Very Slow Link Building = Best

Unless you are featured in news articles combined with high non-organic traffic as big well-known new brands, with the resulting social virility, doing zeo to very slow link building is the best in today's SEO.

I notice many previously unknown and new sites that have such few backlinks (clearly don't do offpage seo) ranking higher and much more sustainably long term when they go easy and lazy on this.

When a site first starts out it goes through a 1-12 month sandbox period depending on niche. Some higher times if it's a known spammed-niche, some less if they are usually a clean niche.

Google is trying to figure out what is your topical authority on whatever subject you write about, and is monitoring/testing your trustworthyness if you are a spamming link builder.

If you refrain from spamming your site with backlinks, and even building ZERO links, you will come out of sandbox with a great score and trust if you have a lot of topcal authority through content on your niche subject.

You will have built expertise, authority and trust (EAT) without being marked a spammer.

Once this sandbox probationary period is over going very slow on link building and appearing natural such as 1 good link per month even will propel you higher than blasting your site and overworking yourself.

More results, longer lasting results, with less work on your part to enjoy your life while seeing success.

The ONLY way i have seen sites get away with heavy link building/acquisition is when featured on NEWS sites and also getting a lot of non-organic traffic and this justifies their links.

A nobody entering the field will gain a ton more going the prudent way and letting his site age out of sandbox and let EAT in the niche take effect followed by a natural appearing link growth later on.

-Your Friendly SEO Duck

Thanks seo duck!

Very well explained, tho im not sure how much of it is true.

Ofc if you do to much fiverr $5 sir special contextual backlinks 90DA it going to kill your site.

But 1 Link? What if my site is good and i get more? I actually never do link building, im just courious...

Blue Panda said:

Thanks seo duck!

Very well explained, tho im not sure how much of it is true.

Ofc if you do to much fiverr $5 sir special contextual backlinks 90DA it going to kill your site.

But 1 Link? What if my site is good and i get more? I actually never do link building, im just courious...

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Np,

The 1 link per month suggestion is if you're building links.

If you're earning more than that naturally thats fine, but keep it mind these would have come because you had enough organic either once out of sandbox and begin really ranking, through news mentions or social activity that enough webmasters will have seen your content to create links back to you. So the organic/non-organic traffic which usually also comes with some months in age for enough exposure for natural links to come will have jusftified any link acquisitions.

The problem is when we have have not yet reached any organic rank trapped in sandbox, or acquired high social/news traffic that google begins seeing links to your site that you've built too early as manipulated.

They know how many serp clicks they are sending you, how new your site is, and through chrome and other means can estimate your traffic on-site.

Once out of sandbox with good trust by not spamming, you will naturally by time get an explosive growth which will give you reach to many webmasters so links will begin to snowball after this time if you have great content, if you don't then you can build few good quality links as google will see "Hey, well we are sending him traffic now, he has exposure, those links are probably naturally earned"

If a new site still in sandbox getting 0-1 click per day organically, no social activity/news mentions and no real traffic, google would easily flag 10, 20, 100 links as spam as it doesn't make sense these came naturally.

for some citation information consider the google patent matt cutts helped develop.

"For example, it may be assumed that a document with a fairly recent inception date will not have a significant number of links from other documents (i.e., back links).

Consider the example of a document with an inception date of yesterday that is referenced by 10 back links. This document may be scored higher by search engine 125 than a document with an inception date of 10 years ago that is referenced by 100 back links because the rate of link growth for the former is relatively higher than the latter. While a spiky rate of growth in the number of back links may be a factor used by search engine 125 to score documents, it may also signal an attempt to spam search engine 125. Accordingly, in this situation, search engine 125 may actually lower the score of a document(s) to reduce the effect of spamming."

Significant number in math and programming means any non-ZERO value. Even one link too early that doesnt make sense could do a lot more harm than good.

Be prudent, be lazy, and succeed my friend

kuruptseo said:

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That sounds reasonable to me. Thanks for taking that much time to explain.

Is Google so advanced these days? Didnt expect that.

I once had a blog where i did build links and it got 4 indexed Pages Penalty. But it was a expired domain too. I just stopped using both expired domains and links in future and just wait for organic traffic.

Blue Panda said:

That sounds reasonable to me. Thanks for taking that much time to explain.

Is Google so advanced these days? Didnt expect that.

I once had a blog where i did build links and it got 4 indexed Pages Penalty. But it was a expired domain too. I just stopped using both expired domains and links in future and just wait for organic traffic.

Click to expand...

My pleasure,

i don't think the 4 pages thing is a penalty as some claim, i think its part of sandbox when you cannot find even your brand using domain extention (site.com) in search query rank at all.

I suspect and there is discussion online the sandbox like i mentioned above is harsher in some niches than others, particularly if the niche your in is generally heavily spammed and/or highly competitive.

I've launched quite a few sites in piracy field.. the ones that focus on "torrent" tend to get this 4 page phenomenon which disappears in about 5-6 months and many pages showing without doing anything at all. Yet when i build serial/crack sites with no torrent for targeted keywords they index properly always.

Also if the domain was expired too long or you changed the topic theme when relaunching on it, its very likely links and age were reset and started as a new site so again back in sandbox period, there is a part in the patent that also describes this.

What niche was the site? Did you wait long enough (6 months +) to see more pages index or did you give up on it too soon?

kuruptseo said:

My pleasure,

i don't think the 4 pages thing is a penalty as some claim, i think its part of sandbox when you cannot find even your brand using domain extention (site.com) in search query rank at all.

I suspect and there is discussion online the sandbox like i mentioned above is harsher in some niches than others, particularly if the niche your in is generally heavily spammed and/or highly competitive.

I've launched quite a few sites in piracy field.. the ones that focus on "torrent" tend to get this 4 page phenomenon which disappears in about 5-6 months and many pages showing without doing anything at all. Yet when i build serial/crack sites with no torrent for targeted keywords they index properly always.

Also if the domain was expired too long or you changed the topic theme when relaunching on it, its very likely links and age were reset and started as a new site so again back in sandbox period, there is a part in the patent that also describes this.

What niche was the site? Did you wait long enough (6 months +) to see more pages index or did you give up on it too soon?

Click to expand...

I am in the mod apk niche. After doing almost zero link building for a year I decided to purchase two link packages here at BHW. The links were good enough but they almost did nothing to my rankings. So for me I think neither of the options are working. What should I do?

shady185 said:

I am in the mod apk niche. After doing almost zero link building for a year I decided to purchase two link packages here at BHW. The links were good enough but they almost did nothing to my rankings. So for me I think neither of the options are working. What should I do?

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how many links would you say you built over the year, and were any done from first month?

also how has your traffic grown before the link package on age alone at 12 months?

Over the year it was 20-25. No, they were done at least after the 6th month. Before the link packages the traffic was at 5.5k users per month.

ok you did very good waiting the 6 months before building any links.

so you built 20-25 over the next 6 months, did you space out when they went live since beginning from 0 so as not to show google a flood? going from 0 must be very careful. a site with 1000s of existing links can easily gain 50-75 at a time without setting off flags but a site with 0, even 10 in one go is not recommended.

5.5k is decent, but is it a small niche and do you have a lot of content?

finally, did you check if your BHW links were indexed and registering in GSC?

The niche is big enough, as the biggest players in the field have a traffic of 10M+. I have about 700 posts. Many are AI written and some are manually written. Content is not the problem, I guess because almost all sites in the niche have either directly copied it from PlayStore or have spun content. Main thing is the direct download link which I am providing.

Some of the links are indexed and showing up in GSC.

shady185 said:

The niche is big enough, as the biggest players in the field have a traffic of 10M+. I have about 700 posts. Many are AI written and some are manually written. Content is not the problem, I guess because almost all sites in the niche have either directly copied it from PlayStore or have spun content. Main thing is the direct download link which I am providing.

Some of the links are indexed and showing up in GSC.

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ok you have a decent volume of content at 700 posts. i doubt content is the problem, even garbage content ranks despite what people say.

my only concern now is,

how much did you space out those 25 links over 6 months making them live?

and

how many links in the BHW package? maybe those were too many at once as well and if your traffic is same luckily didn't penalize you but algo decided to devalue them if they were too many in one go.

One had 40 edu links out of which most didn't got indexed. Only 5-6 got indexed and they are showing up in GSC. I also didn't tried them to index either. It was on the homepage only. The other package had 15 links and it pointed to a single post. 3-4 links have got indexed but that post went down by 5-6 positions.

shady185 said:

One had 40 edu links out of which most didn't got indexed. Only 5-6 got indexed and they are showing up in GSC. I also didn't tried them to index either. It was on the homepage only. The other package had 15 links and it pointed to a single post. 3-4 links have got indexed but that post went down by 5-6 positions.

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40 is a lot. and then 15 more.

you jumped 55 links in a short period of time from ~25. this is a 220% sudden increase in your backlink profile, probably in same month.

many articles ive read concerning link velocity say not go to above even 20% in any given month.

we have to think of building our link velocity on a monthly basis, not daily.

also keep in mind just because many of the edus werent indexed, google still crawls them and sees a backlink to you on those pages, they crawl everything even if they don't index everything. this is why you have an exluded section under GSC coverage often showing "crawled but not indexed"

also gsc will not always show all your links it finds, either your backlink links to a post that is currently not indexed (sometimes they fall out temporarily) or for another reason if it devalues it wont show always.

finally, what was the spacing of the 25 you built over 6 months? these should be done with even more caution since you were going from 0 per month.

The spacing for the 25 links was around 3-4 months. Also, since I have made the mistake what should I do next?

Also, have you ever done SEO for any kind of downloading sites?

shady185 said:

The spacing for the 25 links was around 3-4 months. Also, since I have made the mistake what should I do next?

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ok i dont think you did any damage if they were 25 links over 4 months. i wouldve gone with maybe 10 going from 0 but i doubt you did any harm.

the BHW links were definitely too much. the only way this kind of spiky growth could be justified so google values them if it sees heavy social sharing / virility or some kind of event that would trigger and support this type of growth.

If you're post went down they didnt just devalued they actually caused your rank score to decrease slightly.

i would suggest maybe disavow a chunk of the BHW ones and continue building very conservatively over the next few months.

if you order a package again make sure they drip feed links when making them live, as slow as possible will ensure maximum effect.

kuruptseo said:

ok i dont think you did any damage if they were 25 links over 4 months. i wouldve gone with maybe 10 going from 0 but i doubt you did any harm.

the BHW links were definitely too much. the only way this kind of spiky growth could be justified so google values them if it sees heavy social sharing / virility or some kind of event that would trigger and support this type of growth.

If you're post went down they didnt just devalued they actually caused your rank score to decrease slightly.

i would suggest maybe disavow a chunk of the BHW ones and continue building very conservatively over the next few months.

if you order a package again make sure they drip feed links when making them live, as slow as possible will ensure maximum effect.

Click to expand...

Will 5 links per month would be good from here? Also, most of the edu links are not showing up in GSC, should I disavow them as well?

shady185 said:

Also, have you ever done SEO for any kind of downloading sites?

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My niche is exactly that torrent/crack/serial/downloads

I too have a direct download affiliate button on all my content pages.

Make sure you nofollow this too to avoid outbound link penalty chance.

What i do is i link the button via a <form> tag not <a> tag and even nofollow it to be extra careful not to appear as strictly an affiliate site.

My advice about all the linking is because i had 2 blogs with only 50 posts i forgot about after posting for few months that each got 1000uniques a day from SERP until i got greedy and excited and ruined them with building, before that never built any links since i forgot about them

Whereas sites with DB of 2million+ torrent pages couldnt get ever over 20 clicks a day from SERP that i built links too early, or too fast.

Now im going along with the advice im sharing and have launched new networks that im building ZERO links for until i see they are coming out of sandbox guaging from organic impression/clicks growth, and then i will begin....very conversatively so each link provides maximum juice and doesnt cause harm also.

10 sites launched in January, 10 last month. so i have pretty long time to wait but im sure from experience and reading it will be worth the wait

shady185 said:

Will 5 links per month would be good from here? Also, most of the edu links are not showing up in GSC, should I disavow them as well?

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disavow them anyways yes, not all, but maybe a chunk of them, although google doesnt want to show you them its likely crawled and seen them if its been some time since they were created.

start with 2-3 per month, be lazy, and ensure maximum effect. see where that takes you first.

you can always build more if not enough but you cannot build less if you've gone overboard.

the 55 links were very sudden and if u experienced ranking slips you may have hurt your rep just a little with the algo.

continue very conservatively and earn your trust back.

in the meantime maybe you can begin another mod apk site and build zero links and just let it age so if this one doesn't get explosive growth the other will be aging while appearing as natural as possible.

kuruptseo said:

disavow them anyways yes, not all, but maybe a chunk of them, although google doesnt want to show you them its likely crawled and seen them if its been some time since they were created.

start with 2-3 per month, be lazy, and ensure maximum effect. see where that takes you first.

you can always build more if not enough but you cannot build less if you've gone overboard.

the 55 links were very sudden and if u experienced ranking slips you may have hurt your rep just a little with the algo.

continue very conservatively and earn your trust back.

in the meantime maybe you can begin another mod apk site and build zero links and just let it age so if this one doesn't get explosive growth the other will be aging while appearing as natural as possible.

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Thanks for your advice. It really means a lot.